Avoiding Fake Apple Products

If you look around online you'll find many counterfeit Apple products at major online retailers. While these may be cheaper, they are usually much lower quality and not worth it. You can often spot these fakes by looking for red flags on the sales pages and reading reviews.

So you need to buy an Apple product but you think maybe you can save a few bucks if you don't go to the Apple store. So you go to the largest online retailer or some other retailer online and you search there to see if they've got it.

For instance, we'll search here in Amazon for Apple Earphones. The first hit that comes up here is this one. Let's check that out. It even says it's by Apple. Sure enough the first result here is a best seller. That's sounds good. Apple Earphones. It even has a serial number so it's probably the real thing. Right? It says it's by Apple so it's got to be the real thing. The best thing. It's almost half the price. These are usually $29.

So let's go into this and we can see here, yeah, it's Apple. Three stars seems a little low but people like to complain about things. Right? There's ten thousand reviews. It's cheap and look the product seems to be just like the ones you've got. So you go ahead and order these BUT what you're going to get aren't the real things. They're not the real things at all. I got my hands on these and I was able to compare them to the real ones.

So somebody in my family bought these fake ones and I compared them to the real ones bought at the Apple Store. The packaging is completely different. It's actually more substantial with the fake ones. It's a plastic case, a really cheap plastic case. It was held together with a little piece of scotchtape though which I know Apple would never do. Apple's got those little nice round pieces of tape or things are glued together in a certain way. So this kind of is a really cheap, feels cheap, packaging. The Apple one is this nice retail packaging. Very different. There were lots of other little signs as well. There's the tape there.

Opening it up and looking at them closely they look very similar but there are some differences. Notice the little R there for right and there's one for left as well. It's a lot darker than any I've ever seen on an Apple set of earbuds. The cable seems just a little cheaper. It's not quite right. But the main thing, of course, is that they don't sound right. Trying these out we can tell right away that they don't sound right.

So here's the Apple packaging. Apple packaging has got to be very eco friendly. It comes with a little instruction booklet and everything. You know, the idea is less waste here. Apple has done a lot to eliminate waste and get higher ratings for being environmentally friendly in their packaging. Here's the real thing. They definitely feel just a little bit better. There's really no definitive reason why they feel better they just do. There's a little bit of, just feels like they're more solid. But the definite difference can be heard comparing one to the other. There was no question especially in the base range for these. No question that these were real ones and the other ones were just really cheap poor headphones.

So how can you avoid this? How can you identify counterfeit products on online sales pages? Well, fortunately there are a lot of red flags here. So despite the fact that it says it's from Apple this isn't the name of an Apple product. They're not called Apple Earphones. As a matter of fact even the old ones were called earbuds. The current ones are called EarPods. Here's the actual product at the Apple page. So they're called EarPods with 3.5 mm Headphone Plug. That's the official name and if this was the real thing at the very least it would have that official name there. Of course the price is a red flag too. You're not going to be able to buy Apple products that cheaply.

Then if you go to the reviews there are tons of people here that talk about the fact that these are not really Apple headphones. Tons of them and you think well maybe if there was one there and everyone else said they are real maybe that one person was mistaken. But there are plenty of reviews here that say they're not. Even in the question and answer session people ask over and over again are these authentic. Their answer is no.

Now there are a bunch of five star reviews too. Maybe some of those are fakes. Other ones seem to be from people that aren't too picky and are just excited about getting a replacement set where the price is okay. But obviously there's enough here for you to be extremely suspicious of this product and move on.

But you're not necessarily stuck in paying full price for Apple products. There are a lot of alternatives out there. For instance, for earphones there are lots of third party earphones that are just fine. That are cheaper than $29 and are decent. They're not trying to be counterfeits. They are their own thing and they work on a variety of different devices and you may want to look into those if you don't want to spend the money to get things full price. The same goes for a lot of different Apple peripherals. But you should definitely try to avoid these counterfeit ones because not only are they lying to you about being real but in most cases they are very poor quality.

Barbara: How long ago was that though? The fake ones were trying to emulate real packaging, but were clearly out-of-date.

Susan Herron

12/21/17 @ 11:39 am

I also got my earphones from Apple in the same packaging you showed as fake. Got my phone a few years ago. It’s the 6s.

John Moore

12/21/17 @ 12:04 pm

Gary I have two of the “apple” earphones.Both of them look exactly like the product which you say are the fakes but they came with apple products, one a Mac and the other an iPad a much older iPad. My Mac is from 2015. Gary the plastic case that it came with has the apple logo imprinted on the back and looks like the logo on my Mac.Very confusing

John: If yours came from Apple, then they are real. Not sure what is confusing. The packaging back then would have looked like that.

Dennis Czech

12/21/17 @ 9:02 pm

Is there a secret to using the Apple iPhones? I can’t get them to stay in my ears.

Nate

12/21/17 @ 11:18 pm

I don’t see anything confusing about Gary’s point. He says that the knockoffs come in a package which is not the package that the current Earpods from Apple are packaged in. The knockoffs are emulating packaging that earlier products from Apple came in. That’s the point he makes about clues about fakes. But his point is that the fakes are not the same quality. If you want to buy a product closer to Apple quality, he suggests considering brands which do not try to pretend to be from Apple.